BACK during his salad days of the ’70s and ’80s, Woody Allen borrowed from and paid homage to masters like Ingmar Berg man and Federico Fellini.

“Scoop,” a marginally funny comedy at best, recycles themes, scenes and even lines from Allen’s own old movies – like many of Allen’s later efforts.

Sometimes this works.

The overpraised thriller “Match Point” wasn’t anywhere near as good as “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But freed from the necessity to be funny and forced to relocate to London to find backing, Allen as a director demonstrated an energy that’s been missing from most of his later films.

“Scoop,” a half-baked amalgam of “Manhattan Murder Mystery” and “Curse of the Jade Dragon” that he cooked up as a vehicle for himself and his current muse, Scarlett Johansson, sadly demonstrates that Allen has lost much of his comic timing both as a director and an actor.

Johannsson plays Sondra Pransky, an American college student and aspiring journalist holidaying in London.

One night she is talked into performing in a disappearing act by a kvetchy, third-rate magician named Sid Waterman (Allen).

In the course of the act, Sondra is contacted by Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), a recently deceased British tabloid reporter who has a news tip: The aristocratic Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is probably a serial killer who leaves tarot cards on his victims’ bodies.

Sondra improbably persuades Sid to masquerade as her father – they bicker a lot – so she can romance Lyman to get the goods on him and secure a future in journalism.

There are a few laughs here, but mostly the situations seem forced and mechanical, as when the gauche Sid horrifies the guests at the country estate of Lyman’s family.

At this point, Allen gets more winces than laughs when he delivers, without anything like his former panache, lines like, “I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but when I got older I converted to narcissism.”

As a director, he seems to assume that the casting of shiksa goddess Johannson as a bespectacled member of the tribe is automatically funny, but her awkward attempts at assuming Woody-like cadences only remind us that she was the weak link, acting-wise, in “Match Point.”

Allen does Johansson no favor by comparing her character in dialogue to Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. She also has zero chemistry with Jackman, whose character exists purely as a plot function.

“Scoop” boasts a slapdash climax inspired, as was some of “Match Point,” by “An American Tragedy,” with a little “Love and Death” thrown in for good measure.

It’s time for Allen to stop cranking out a film annually, a pace he has maintained since 1969. And it probably wouldn’t hurt his comic skills if he went back to performing stand-up.